The good stuff

He made cigars in the hidden, then lit them and passed one to her.

The room held her smell, fresh lilac, pathetic.

The smell of the desert had covered it. He realized he was afraid of the desert ahead.

"His name is Scott," she said. No harshness had been worn out of her voice. "Just Scott. He died."

The slayer waited.

"He was touched by God."

The slayer said, "I have never seen Him."

"He was here ever since I can recall—Scott, I mean, not God."

She laughed jaggedly into the dark. "He had honey-wagon for a while. Started to drink. Started to smell the grass. Then to smoke it.

The kids started to follow him around and sic their dogs onto him. He wore ancient green pants that stank.

Do you understand?"

"Yes." He started to chew it. At the last he just sat in there and didn't eat anything. He might have been a king, in his mind.

The children might have been his jesters, and the dogs his princes."Yes."

"He died right in front of this place," she said."

Came clumping down the boardwalk—his boots wouldn't wear out, they were engineer boots he found in the old trainyard—with the children and dogs behind him.

He looked like wire clothes hangers all wrapped and twirled together. You could see all the lights of hell in his eyes, but he was grinning, just like the grins the children carve into their sharp roots and pumpkins, come Reap.

You could smell the silt and the rot and the weed. It was running down from the corners of his mouth like green blood.

I think he meant to come in and listen to Bosz play the piano. And right in front, he stopped and cocked his head.

I could see him, and I thought he heard a coach, although there was none due.

Then he puked, and it was black and full of blood. It went right through that grin like sewer water through a grate.

The stink was enough to make you want to run mad. He raised his arms and just threw over. That was all.

He died in his vomit with that grin on his face."

"A nice story."

"Oh yes, thankee-sai. This is a fine place."

She was trembling beside him. Outside, the wind kept up its steady whine, and somewhere far away a door was banging, as a sound heard in a dream. Mice ran into the walls.

The slayer thought in the back of his mind that it was maybe the only place in town successful enough to support mice.

He put a hand on her belly and she started violently, then loosened up.

"The ebony man," he said.

"You have to have it, don't you?

You couldn't just throw me a fuck and go to sleep."

"I have to have it."

"All right. I will tell you." She grabbed his hand in both of hers and told him.

He came in the late afternoon of the day Scott died, and the wind was whooping it up, pulling away the loose topsoil, sending sheets of grit and uprooted stalks of corn windmilling past.

Regan Almiron had padlocked the livery, and the few other dealers had shuttered their windows and laid boards across the shutters.

The sky was the yellow color of old cheese and the clouds flew across it as if they had seen something terrifying in the desert wastes where they had so lately been.

The slayer's quarry came in a rickety rig with a rippling tarp tied across its bed.

There was a big howdy-do of a grin on his face. They watched him come, and old man Almiron, lying by the window with a bottle in one hand and the loose, hot flesh of his second-eldest daughter's left breast in the other, resolved not to be there if he should knock.

But the ebony man went by without slowing the bay that pulled his rig, and the spinning wheels spumed up dust that the wind clutched eagerly.

He might have been a clergyman or a monk; he wore a black robe that had been floured with dust, and a loose hood covered his head and obscured his features, but not that awful happy grin. The robe trickled and fluttered.

From beneath the garment's hem, there peeped heavy buckled boots with square toes.

He pulled up in front of Bosz and tethered the horse, which lowered its head and grunted at the ground.

Around the back of the rig, he untied one flap, found a weathered saddlebag, threw it over his shoulder, and went in through the batwings.

Alina watched him with curiosity, but no one else noticed his arrival.

The regulars were drunk as lords. Bosz was playing orthodox hymns ragtime, and the grizzled layabouts who had come in early to avoid the storm and to attend Scott's wake had sung themselves hoarse.

Bosz, drunk nearly to the point of foolishness, drunk and horny with his own continued existence, played with hectic, shuttlecock speed, fingers flying like looms.

Voices screeched and hollered, never overcoming the wind but sometimes seeming to challenge it.

In the corner, Billy had thrown Rose Elton's skirts over her head and was painting Reap-charms on her knees. A few other women circulated. A fever seemed to be on all of them.

The dull stormglow that filtered through the batwings seemed to mock them, however.

Scott had been laid out on two tables in the center of the room.

His engineer boots made a mystical V.

His mouth hung open in a slack grin, although someone had closed his eyes and put slugs on them.

His hands had been folded on his chest with a sprig of devil grass in them. He smelled like poison.

The ebony man pushed back his hood and came to the bar.

Alina watched him, feeling suspicion mixed with the familiar want that hid within her.

There was no holy symbol on him, although that meant nothing by itself.

"Vodka," he said. His voice was soft and pleasant. "I want the good stuff, honey."

She reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of Taaka.

She could have palmed off the local popskull on him as her best, but did not.

She poured, and the ebony man watched her.

His eyes were large and radiant. The shadows were too thick to define their color exactly.

Her need heightened. The hollering and whooping went on behind, undiscussed.

Bosz, the worthless gelding, was playing about the Christian Soldiers and somebody had urged Aunt Neya to sing.

Her voice, warped and distorted, cut through the babble like a dull ax through a calf's brain.

"Hey, Allie!"